Browse High Country News issues

As a new boom in coalbed methane gas drilling hits the
West, some counties are taking on industry-friendly state
regulating agencies and demanding that gas companies listen to
local concerns. Also in this
issue: EPA chief Christie Whitman and Idaho Sen. Larry
Craig dipped champagne glasses in Idaho's Lake Coeur d'Alene and
toasted the newly-created commission tasked with cleaning up mining
waste in the lake. But the Coeur d'Alene Tribe wants the problem to
be taken seriously.

The drought of 2002 has left the West blistered and burnt,
scientists predict worse to come. Have we learned anything yet?
Also in this issue: This
year's drought has killed 10,000 cattle and ravaged the range. But
corruption and resentment over earlier attempts to control grazing
are stifling reform just when it's needed most.

After generations of struggle, the Western Shoshone decide in a divisive election to accept land settlement payments from the federal government in lieu of the tribe's ancestral lands, which one spanned the Great Basin.

A visit to the biggest forest fire in Colorado history -- the Hayman Fire -- and time spent with some of those battling it leads the author to speculate on the mystery and complexity of humanity's relationship with fire.

Inhabiting a parcel of land in Montana's Bitterroot Valley demands a specific responsibility, according to the writer, who attempts ecological restoration on his piece of ground, to help bring back the West's rich biological diversity.

The brine-shrimp industry of Great Salt Lake has helped put that misunderstood ecosystem under a microscope; can the lake be saved from its history of abuse and a rapidly increasing population around it?

In West Yellowstone, Mont., where snowmobile tourism is a mainstay of the economy, locals are split between fierce supporters of the industry and those who favor a little more quiet and a measure of control.

On South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation, some Oglala Lakota are defying the federal government to grow industrial hemp, hoping that it can help to revitalize both the tribe's economy and its government.

Across the Interior West, as the sagebrush sea recedes under the environmental stress of human impacts, its emblematic bird, the sage grouse, is also in decline, and no one seems to know what to do about it.

Along New Mexico's Middle Rio Grande, pueblo tribes are working to bring back the disappearing bosque - the cottonwood gallery forest that once lined the river, offering habitat, shade and leafy bounty to a dry landscape.

Three years after cows were banned from some Southwestern rivers, the San Francisco River in the Gila National Forest shows signs of recovery, but struggling ranchers and uneven wildlife numbers prove that the struggle over desert grazing is still alive.

In Arizona's Galiuro Mountains, desert streams appear and disappear during the course of a day, and the native fish that have adapted to this complex ecosystem face extinction due to introduced non-natives.